Arduino and Pi Together At Last: The folks behind the fabulous BrickPi project have just kicked off a kickstarter for their next project, Arduberry. This time, they are making a board for the Raspberry Pi which gives the Pi compatibility with the world of Arduino shields. Actually, it adds a whole Arduino Uno to the Raspberry Pi and its going to open up a whole world of possibilities… board adapter, IO controller, compact teaching platform. It’s an open design and the kickstarter’s already funded but Pi owners everywhere will want to add one of these beasts; I’ve already backed the project and can’t wait to play when they deliver in (hopefully) May.

Coming in Node 0.12: Badly titled, but worth reading What’s New in Node.js 0.12 is a posting on the StrongLoop blog about what to look forward to when Node 0.12 arrives. As they point out, its been cooking for nine months but has speed ups for writable streams, TLS support, crypto algorithms, a less strained garbage collector, better cluster work allocation and improved timers. They also have a 15 minute video on more of whats going to land in 0.12.

Next-gen video royalties announced: The issue of royalties around h264 were core to the resistance to the standard that in turn led to the creation of VP8 and a stall in web video development while battle lines were drawn. Well, that battle is about to begin again with HEVC, the follow up standard to h264, but streamingmedia.com brings news of what those royalties will probably be. As the article says, the one to watch in this game is Google, who despite developing VP8 (and VP9, their open source HEVC competitor), sat on the pragmatic fence over h264, supporting both in a move which left the idealists at Mozilla out on a limb.